Friday, January 05, 2007

Accounting For Health

185 Accounting for Health

Those wonderful folks who brought us slavery, the poll tax, snake oil, country music and grits have done it again!They don’t know it.But they have.

Deep in the heart of Texas and Mississippi, a new form of improved wellness was born from the ashes of the Enron and WorldCom scandals.Accounting for health.The way to fitness and longevity never before imagined.And all it takes is a few strokes of the pencil.

First some background:Some companies have no product or service other than their stock price.And the way they make their stock price rise when there’s no underlying value to support it is to cook the books.But the recipes developed recently put simple graft and embezzlement to shame.

You’re having a bad quarter?Sell assets to yourself.But be sneaky about it.Form a subsidiary to buy the bad stuff.That way, the bad stuff goes off your balance sheet or at least into the footnotes that no one reads.

But why limit this brilliant concept to mere money?Apply it to your annual physical.

Figures came back lousy?No worries.Form another person and get the bad stuff off your medical records.

Overweight?Let’s say you should be, oh, 165 or 170 pounds and you weigh 210.No problem.Donate or sell 30 or 40 pounds to You Associates, LP.Your weight’s normal.Your medical report shines.And the derivative?Who cares about You Associates.

Blood pressure too high?Form a second subsidiary, Y-A-II LP.Sell the diastolic overage to Y-A and the systolic to Y-A II.Gone.Practically impossible to trace.And your medical report shines even brighter.

Now that you have those two subsidiaries, why limit your generosity to health.

You can work the same magic with you GPA or report card.You can work the same magic with the whole planet.Global warming a problem?Get those spare degrees of temperature off the climate charts.Form a “special purpose” satellite or better yet a special purpose PLANET. A few degrees to spare?Get them off the books.Sell those fine assets to Second Moon LP.Leave the worries elsewhere.

You live in the Mississippi flood zone?No worries.Create a SpecialPurposeRiver, and put the extra water on THEIR books, not your basement.

Of course, the companies were this stuff was invented are out of business.And some of the inventors are in jail.But they took actual dollars from other people, while you’re merely giving things away.

Now, go have a nice Big Mac or Whopper for dinner.

Your cholesterol level is fabulous, so you know what to say when they ask you “you want fries with that?